Thursday, May 07, 2015

I was going to write something about the sheer inadequacy of the Tory approach to dealing with Britain's problems but I can't improve on this.

Then I thought I'd write a little about how 'tactical' voting always leads, sooner or later, to strategic defeat but then I saw this.

Both too good not to read in full, but the deeper question is how the Hell did we get here anyway? US blogger Ace puts his finger on it:

This is about class. This is all about class.

This is about, specifically, the careerist, cowardly, go-along-to-get-along mores of the Upper Middle Class, the class of people whose parents were all college educated, and of course are college educated themselves; the class that dominates our thought-transmitting institutions (because non-college educated people are more of less shut out of this industry)...

This is why we have no actual conservative movement worth a damn: Because our political officers and our thought leaders are all drawn from, and aspire to advance in, the same Upper Middle Class Northeast-and-California cultural consensus of "respectability."

True, he's technically speaking about the narrow question of whether or not people deserve to murdered for drawing cartoons, but it still holds true generally.

I can believe that a lot of Professional Conservatives in Britain can see the damage the left has done to this country, but they still can't bring themselves to do anything about it if that would mean risking the loss of those super-exclusive dinner party invites, let alone letting people who don't even get invited in the first place get their grubby hands on the levers of power (i.e. UKIP).

To the point:

To escape the Matrix, you must first see the Matrix -- something Andrew Breitbart was fond of observing.

To be a traitor to one's Class is to be a patriot towards humanity.

Maybe Marx said that. Maybe I did. I don't know. But I do believe it.
I believe that far too many ideas we have are non-ideas, things we've
never actually thought through, but are simply Class Assumptions, and
that we are all too afraid to go against our herd, our tribe, and start
questioning some goddamned Class Assumptions.

A lot of people in Britain have got to ditch the idea that the Tories represent people like them. It's easy to mock people who vote Labour because their dad did and their grandad before them, but large parts of the right aren't much different. People seriously need to ask themselves when was the last time the conservatives did something that seriously struck back at the liberal consensus - I'm guessing not since 1990.

In so far as there are any excuses for modern conservatism, they rest on their supposed economic competence. Never mind how dubious that claim is, there's the wider issue. When it comes to life as it's lived by real people the Tories have all but announced that the left can do what they want, and if you don't like it, you're probably racist or summink. They're betting the ballot fodder will keep voting for them no matter what. History will show whether they're right or not.